Contamination
2026
Sculptures made over the past year in conversation with each other, inside the room built from weaving straps, branches; landscaped with found forms of wood shaped and jointed at 9O degree angles
Two channel video installation, 8min in loop
'Contamination' emerged from a dramatic shift in time and condition. Over the course of three months, the space was slowly sculpted through the act of living within it. Then, during an intense two-day period, most of the belongings inside were subjected to accelerated decay. What remained were the objects we had hand-crafted over the past two years, nestled within a landscape of furniture suspended and held together by woven membrane. The work exists as a residue of duration and rupture — a meeting point between gradual inhabitation and sudden transformation.
At the core of our practice lies an ongoing negotiation between self and other. This negotiation operates across multiple scales: from the relationship between our bodies and building materials to cross-cultural dialogues unfolding globally. Contemporary thought often follows a linear model that divides knowledge and ways of living into binaries — the pure and the contaminated, the ancient and the modern. Such divisions create narrow channels through which each side can encounter or digest the other.
Through this work, we question the impulse to preserve one realm as pure while casting the other as contaminated. Instead, we propose occupying the boundary itself: walking along the edge that produces otherness. We seek to rewire spectatorship — to move contemplation away from safe distance and toward embodied entanglement. To allow ourselves to be “eaten” by the forces of othering, and to consume them in return, so that we may emerge on the other side without fear of being made other.
Within the installation, each element addresses the friction that arises when communicating across borders — whether material, cultural, or perceptual. To hold a point of view is already to fall on one side of a boundary; there is always an inside and an outside. Contamination asks how we might sidestep mediation and instead enter the unstable, messy interference patterns produced by the multitude of existence.
The entire room captures a suspended moment of this flux — a frozen frame within an otherwise continuous process of transformation. It holds the residue of decay, the persistence of handmade objects, and the tension between collapse and construction in a single spatial composition. The woven membrane, derived from the age-old technology that turns line into plane and plane into volume, threads through the space as both structure and threshold. Machine-woven from nylon, its pattern feels inherited yet difficult to trace. In this convergence of hand-crafted remnants, synthetic fabric and right-angled landscaping, the room refuses clear origin or stable categorization. It inhabits contamination as a shared condition of coexistence rather than a state of impurity.